RAPID
Retrospective Analyses of Potential Interventions and Determinants for COVID-19
“OXON leads international collaborative programme to evaluate non-randomised comparative studies of treatments for COVID-19 and prognostic factors”
BACKGROUND
The new coronavirus pandemic is an international emergency that is causing severe medical burden.
Covid-19 is the new corona virus-induced disease and SARS-CoV-2 is the RNA coronavirus, which is also called Covid-19 virus by World Health Organization (WHO). The Covid-19 virus is highly contagious and causes high morbidity – with severe cases requiring hospitalisation and ventilatory support which can overwhelm national health systems – and significant mortality and for which there is no demonstrated effective vaccine or treatment.
Hence, many repurposed drugs are being tested for their usefulness in COVID-19.
OXON is working with an international team of academics, and clinicians who treat COVID-19 patients, to help provide reliable evidence to make decisions about pharmacological interventions in hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
RWE and RTCs
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) provide the most comparable groups at baseline to furnish the most unbiased evidence of treatment effects, although unblinded RCTs may harbour greater post-baseline biases than blinded RCTs.
Carefully conducted non-randomised treatment comparisons with observational cohort designs may also provide reliable evidence of clinical effectiveness and safety of medications similar to those in randomised trials. Non-randomised comparative studies can complement randomised trials with data on patients excluded from randomised trials, uncommon safety events and greater statistical power and more rapid results if retrospective.
A number of studies in COVID-19, and treatments for other conditions, most notably statins, have cast doubt on the reliability of non-randomised comparisons of treatments for, at least short term, clinical effectiveness and safety.
Therefore, we will be conducting real time systematic comparisons of the results of clinical effectiveness and safety of treatments in hospitalised COVID-19 patients from RCTs and non-randomised studies, which will be submitted for publication as well as being posted on this website.
OXON’s COVID-19 Ongoing Projects
Retrospective Cohort Analysis: Treatments for COVID-19
This is a retrospective study to evaluate the clinical effectiveness and safety of treatments for Covid-19 hospitalised patients and to determine prognostic factors in Spain.
Meta-analysis of non-randomised treatment studies
This is a ´real-time´ systematic review and meta-analysis of non-randomised comparative studies of treatments for hospitalised patients with COVID-19.
To compare in-hospital all-cause mortality in patients managed with standard care and various treatments for COVID-19 in published non-randomised comparative studies.